Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday January 10, 2012 @05:26PM
from the early-look dept.

sfcrazy writes with news that developers for the Tizen project, an open source mobile OS based on MeeGo (itself a child of Moblin and Maemo), have posted a preview of their source code and SDK. They warn, "Please keep in mind that this is a very early preview and is not yet designed for use to create production applications. Further enhancements and improvements to Tizen and its development environment will continue as we work towards a formal release over the coming months." The source code is available here.

Btw, I'm still running Maemo on my N900, but I'll upgrade to Android soonish. Android is good enough, open enough, and satisfies the moral imperative of offering good open source encryption tools [guardianproject.info], i.e. not worthless CALEA garbage like facetime or skype.

Yes, encrypting your traffic is now a moral imperative, look around, maybe you don't have anything worth hiding, but some guy on your ISP probably organizes occupy stuff or wh

Samsung isn't just backing Tizen.. Samsung WROTE Tizen in it's entirety (well except the Open Source bit). They've had Rasterman (the author of the EFL library they're using) on their payroll for quite a few years now.

That said, don't see a great strategy here from Samsung, they're the no1 maker of Android and WP7 phones too. Their strategy seems to do all platforms.

TBH I have no idea what Rasterman's contribution was, but the software on the Freerunner was pretty horrific. That said the main problem was management IMHO - allowing multiple, continuous redesigning of the base platform instead of making a plan and sticking to it.

Most of the code itself is currently from SLP, which itself is pulled from many existing open source projects. Intel will be bringing plenty along with it. There's also a lot of stuff not settled on yet.

...install it on my netbook? Like many Slashdotters, I bought a fist generation EeePC way back when the whole netbook idea was new. I got a "surf" model that only came with 4 gigs of flash storage and nothing more, so finding an adequately small operating system to put on it was rather difficult without doing some tedious custom configurations, when all I wanted was to just surf the web. Moblin/Meego was the perfect thing because I could just download the image from their site, load it up, and boot up wi

Is that from a DVD install? I usually install from their CD ISOs which come with most things I need out of the box. After downloading updates and a few extras, my VM of Kubuntu 11.10 is just over 3GB in size.

The best thing about Moblin/Meego was that it booted in five seconds. The technology was originally demo'd in 2007 by an Intel engineer, and has been part of the project since then. Other distros have picked up on some of the technology (sreadahead, parallel boot) but no one else has come close to the actual boot times. The EeePC's bios also had a 'readahead' feature that basically saved the bios state to disk (SSD) and read that into memory the next boot, practically eliminating the BIOS segment of the boot time. Other mobos presumably have similar features, but seven seconds from power button to desktop on a netbook was mind-blowing at the time, and is still impressive.

IMO they should have kept the focus on it as a netbook platform, and not gotten bogged down trying to package it for car stereos and cell phones and netbooks all at once. It would have made the transition to tablets with little UI modification.

No. It is an open source, Linux based OS that leverages existing technologies found in the Linux world, such as glibc, Xorg, Enlightenment, Webkit, etc. with a focus on being a vendor-independent mobile OS platform. It is, in many ways, a push back against Google, whose platform is almost entirely insular from the rest of the open source world.

'Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree.' Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for its devices since its release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty.

Toward the end of November, the core Android code was returned to the staging tree, from which it had been removed at the end of 2009. Since the code's return to staging, changes have been going in and the code has caught up to its state in the Android tree. The code has now reached a point where, as summarized by Greg Kroah-Hartman on December 16:

Now almost two years later, a new effort that seems to have the backing of the Linux Foundation is aiming to bring Android back to the mainline. The project is officially titled the 'Android Mainlining Project' and was announced at the end of 2011 by Tim Bird Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation and Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment.

I did say "almost." Virtually the rest of the entire platform (Dalvik, Bionic, etc.) are all Google-only and see no use anywhere else. The one area where their system isn't insular, has spent years as a complete fork. Only recently have some changes been pushed upstream, and there are still notable parts not pushed up and meeting well deserved resistance.

"It is an open source, Linux based OS that leverages existing technologies found in the Linux world, such as glibc, Xorg, Enlightenment, Webkit, etc. with a focus on being a vendor-independent mobile OS platform."

So not really focused at all then. It's maemo and meego all over again so far. Fuck that. Samsung, your SII is great, but you really need to build a FULL, ready, RELEASE platform with an SDK that has an IDE, emulators built into the IDE, RAD GUI development, GPS etc. included in the emulator, an

Android itself use Linux operating system, as does Maemo aka Harmattan, as did MeeGo, as does Tizen and as does all other Desktop and Server distributions and not just those mobile phone Linux distributions.

If I were Intel, I'd pay the Maemo/Meego community to do it. Shouldn't cost more than $25k which, for the goodwill alone, is peanuts. They also get one of the best communities in FOSS (these guys will appreciate ANY attention), hundreds of decent apps and a highly attractive platform for developers.

I see no SDK sources being posted except for some valgrind bit, and the SDK page talks about accepting an EULA. Are they really so stupid and try to ram down a proprietary SDK for what is supposed to be an open source operating system? And this within a Linux Foundation project?

Hasn't WebOS pretty much proven that using HTML+CSS+Javascript+web tech du jour) is a brain dead idea?It's a horrible development paradigm that sort of works for the web because there is no other viable option given the constraints of the web. It's idiotic to force a hideous development model born of (web) constraints that do not apply in the target application (an embedded device).

C/C++ is where it's at. Palm, Google and Apple have proven that the so called benefits of using HTML+friends, or Java for that

True, Apple does use a mix of C and Obj-C.The 3 companies were brought up as a rainbow of outcomes. Palm the failure with a brain dead design (web in a box), Google with a successful-because-it's-free platform that is nonetheless a chronic under performer because of the chosen design (Java with pseudo web concepts mixed in) and Apple which is executing better than anyone with a solid design (C/C++/Obj-C with what is essentially a PC development platform).